The essence of libertarianism is its nonaggression principle. In order to determine whether some act or concept or institution is compatible with this philosophy, one may use this as a sort of litmus test.

I get many, many letters from people on this very question, or closely related issues. And, for every letter of this sort I get, there are probably dozens of others who either do not take jobs they would relish, or do so, and feel guilty about this since they think they are violating libertarian principles.

In the days of yore, to say that a man was discriminating was to pay him a compliment. It meant that he had taste; he could distinguish between the poor, the mediocre, the good and the excellent. His ability to make fine distinctions enabled him to live a better life than otherwise.

The miser has never recovered from Charles Dickens's attack on him in A Christmas Carol. Although the miser had been sternly criticized before Dickens, the depiction of Ebenezer Scrooge has become definitive and has passed into the folklore of our time.

From the name itself, academic freedom would seem to be innocuous enough. All it would seem to mean would be that academics, like anyone else, should have freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom to come and go, and freedom to quit a job. The usual freedoms that everyone has. Such is not the case, however.